How do you install it on linux? I'm getting the error,

error: cannot find signatures with metadata for snap "Aether-2.0.0-dev.14+1909192130.00bf3c3.snap"

SO [1] suggests this can be forced with `sudo snap install --dangerous` but that doesn't sound right.

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/822765/snap-install-failure-...

Yep, the flag is right. Unfortunately the way snap is designed is that they really don’t want you to distribute binaries outside their special snap store, to the point that if you try, they try to scare your users off by naming ‘install outside snap store’ flag as ‘--dangerous’.

Interesting, okay. I like your stance on moderation transparency. At this point I'm not sure how many people recognize how important that is.

Moderation transparency is the building block to what comes next: mod elections. That’s the one piece still in the works, after that is done, I’m going to consider it stable.

Can you consider flatpak instead or in addition to canonical's snap? or maybe just a .tar.gz

When I was first considering the Linux packaging question, I did evaluate AppImage, Flatpak, Snap and plain old tar.gz, with AppImage being my favourite. Unfortunately they are not equally polished and AppImage flat out did not work in a consistent manner across multiple Linux variants. Between the rest, tar.gz was ok, but there are a lot of people who don’t know what to do with it. Between Flatpak and Snap, Snap was the vastly more polished experience for the end user and for me, so I bit the bullet on their non-ideal ‘we want to be an Apple App Store clone’ way of working and went with Snap.

It sounds like just what I want.

But I use VPNs. So I'd need to get a mapped port.

What port does Aether want?

Edit: Also, can I just install from source?

It will get whatever it can. You also don’t need a mapped port, Aether can punch holes through firewalls via reverse-opens. (Though having a port open will significantly increase your connection speed and frequency.)

You can look at the port it chooses through netstat, it does not have a fixed port. However, once it gets a working one, it won’t change it from then on so you can map that port.

Edit: you can, but it having an Electron shell for UI (the actual app is Go) makes the build process somewhat complicated. It’s on GitHub though, feel free to take a look at the makefile and give it a shot.

Thanks. I'll use an Ubuntu VM.